It is very easy to find fentanyl in New York. The drug that in 2022 alone killed nearly 110,000 Americans is readily available right here on the streets of this city.
Over the past the year I’ve been investigating the spread of this lethal drug across this country.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid which has a potency many hundreds of times that of morphine.
Largely made in China, its strength means that it is easy to transport huge quantities of the drug. It floods into this country, mainly through Mexico.
One recent evening in New York I headed over to OnPoint – a supervised drug injection site in Washington Heights.
The controversial facility allows addicts to shoot up under “safe” conditions, with staff on hand to revive users if they overdose.
These “safe use” facilities are still in the experimental phase, with many critics as well as supporters.
But, inevitably, it is a meeting place for drug addicts. And although people are not meant to deal drugs inside the facility, inevitably OnPoint is a focal point for people who are using the most lethal drugs.
Hanging around outside at dark it didn’t take me long to find someone who was using fentanyl. He led me over to the park opposite to show me where people were coming to meet dealers.
While I was there I watched a steady stream of people (including a couple pushing a stroller) going into the darkened park. For one reason alone.
Then right there in the middle of the street this man started tourniquet-ing his arm, getting out a needle and burning something up in a container with a lighter. What was it?
“Fentanyl,” he explained.
“Why are you not going to OnPoint to use it now?” I asked. “Because a whole bunch of people in there.”
Instead he filled up the syringe and injected himself right there on the street. Not many yards away the blue lights of a stationary police car lit up the scene.
“Make sure those cops don’t come over here,” he said as he was shooting up. They didn’t seem bothered. This is New York.
“How do you feel now?” I asked him once he was done.
“I could go rob a jewelry store and a bank right now,” he replied, before adding “Just joking.”
I asked him how often he did this. “Every day,” he replied. “Every day. All the pain goes away.”
The ease with which you can find these drugs is just one of the reasons why according to the United Nations, North America has the highest opioid use of any region in the world.
And it’s not just in the major cities that this lethal drug can be found. Today fentanyl is an all of America problem.
I recently connected with an ex-drug dealer called Torren, in his late twenties. He used to sell fentanyl and other drugs on the streets of San Francisco.
He also dealt in drugs on the dark web. He talked me through how easy it is to get lethal drugs this way.
It only took the guidance of someone who knew – a few clicks of a button – to be into an online drugstore like no other. Absolutely every drug was available for purchase.
Some sites took pride in the purity of their products and included test strips with your delivery. Others seemed more sketchy. But what this means is that what was once a big city problem is now a nationwide one.
Torren walked me through how he would send his drugs out to customers when he dealt. He described how he would package the drugs up inside balloons and generally double wrap them in a room away from the package.
All of this to make sure that there was no scent to give the contents of the package away as it crossed America.
How common is this form of drug dealing? Torren laughed as he told me that the USPS is the biggest illicit drug delivery service in the country.
And it’s not just on the dark web that these lethal drugs can be found. Torren showed me how to connect to fentanyl dealers even on social media sites as apparently innocent as Instagram.
He showed me how, if you know the variations of words to put in, it is easy to connect to dealers. Instagram’s bosses to try to chase this down, he explained, but the dealers always find a way around it.
In Torren’s view most of the fentanyl now arriving on America’s streets doesn’t just come through Mexico but is now also made there.
Of course it is insane that a drug of this lethality should be so easily available. It took me no time to find it.
But this is one of the reasons why the New York health authorities last year suggested that all New Yorkers carry Narcan around with them.
I went to a pharmacist who stocks the spray. It goes up the nose and kick starts the brain to override an overdose. I was told that if you can get this up someone’s nose before their lips go blue you can reliably save their life.
As the pharmacist near 10th Avenue told me, “if you see somebody overdosing or anything, you spray it in their nose and it blocks it. It’ll bring them back to life if they’re dozing off or anything.”
And it can be not just for regular users but for people who may have no idea of what they are taking.
Today fentanyl is found not just in heroin but in cocaine and even weed.
“You might take something accidentally. You don’t know – you do it by accident,” says the pharmacist. “They put fentanyl in everything these days.”
They certainly do. Which is something that this city’s recreational drug users should be much more aware of. All it needs is barely a speck of fentanyl to get into other drugs for somebody to overdose and die.
Regular users build up tolerance. In fact a lot of the fentanyl addicts I’ve met in the last year said they started taking the drug because their regular fix of heroin no longer gives them a high.
The heroin – up to ten bags a day – will keep a serious addict just about level. But for the high they need fentanyl.
It is a very dangerous game that they are playing. Many people overdose when coming out of prison, or after otherwise not having used for a while and going straight back to the doses they took beforehand.
When their body had built up a greater tolerance. That is one of the most common causes of overdoses.
But it is even more dangerous for the people who have no idea what they are taking.
One afternoon this past winter I sat down in Central Park, in front of some of New York’s wealthiest buildings, with a drug dealer who was willing to answer questions about his murky business.
I asked him if he ever “cut” other drugs into the drugs he sold.
“Absolutely never,” he insisted. He said that he wants his customers to be safe in order to continue ordering from him. But he said he had heard of other dealers who took less care.
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As we sat in the park by Columbus Circle I asked him where his work had taken him in the city. “Everywhere,” he said, from the richest apartments of the Upper East all the way downtown.
Clearly this city is one of the epicenters of America’s drug crisis. But what a lot of our political and other leaders don’t seem to realize is that this is not a drug crisis like earlier drug crises.
This is not people getting high on pot or dropping the odd pill. This is an epidemic. One that we seem almost have got used to.
The most lethal drugs in the world are flowing into this country. As I’ll show over the coming weeks, they have found their way across the US drug supply. And while a lot of people have got used to it there is no reason why they should.
The fact that New Yorkers are all advised to carry around Narcan says an awful lot about the state of this city. There is much more to say about some of the terrible human tragedies along the way.
But in order to see where we’re going in New York we should also look at where other cities have gone.
That’s why next week I’ll be looking at a nearby city. One of the places in America that has most fully fallen through the floor.
It’s a warning sign of what might happen across the rest of this country as well, unless America wakes up and realizes that none of this is normal.